Page 11 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 11 February 2020
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lives underlines the need to equip members of our community to manage how they experience the devastating impacts of these sorts of circumstances. The response in the ACT, with input from ACT Health, Canberra Health Services, and the Office for Mental Health and Wellbeing, has been a good example of where to start. I know that through the ACT’s evacuation and respite centres, particularly over the new year period, attendees wanted to talk to the mental health support staff about their mental health and seek advice on what they were feeling and how to approach or respond to those feelings.
In today’s discussion, perhaps I can simply paraphrase the advice of the Chief Psychiatrist, Denise Riordan, who highlighted the importance of being kind to ourselves and one another, and the importance of taking the time to process the experience and what we are feeling. When we talk about the fires and smoke that have affected us so badly, it is also important that we are upfront about the causes of the tragedy. This is the only way we can ensure that we improve our response at a government level and take actions that protect us in the future. We cannot make sound decisions if we shy away from the reality.
Despite the efforts of some commentators and others to obfuscate on this issue, there is no doubt that climate change is a significant contributing factor to the terrible summer we have experienced. These are not debatable facts. The science is clear. We simply have to listen to the experts on this matter—the climate scientists, the firefighters and the bushfire experts. We need to listen to people like the group of 24 fire and emergency chiefs and ex-chiefs who have been calling for greater climate action and who have been trying desperately to make this point in all sorts of forums. These are people with decades of leadership experience in fire and emergency management—the types of people we have been thanking in our speeches today.
They say:
Climate change has supercharged the bushfire problem…
Just a 1C temperature rise has meant the extremes are far more extreme, and it is placing lives at risk, including firefighters.
They also emphasise the importance of talking about the course of the future. They say:
The Grenfell fire in London, people talked about the cause from day one. Train crashes they talk from day one. And it is OK to say it is an arsonist’s fault, or pretend that the greenies are stopping hazard reduction burning, which is simply not true.
But you are not allowed to talk about climate change. Well, we are, because we know what is happening.
We can also listen to the climate scientists, like Dr Tom Beer, who wrote the world’s first bushfire and climate change paper and worked at the CSIRO for 30 years; Professor David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science; and Professor Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor at the Australian National University and a
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